[GPSCC-chat] Fwd: [ufpj-activist] Chris Hedges: ONWT March to Nowhere

[fred]

Chris Hedges, the bold reformist, and Mark Stahl, of the United for 
Peace and Justice (ufpj) coalition activist" talk like they are looking 
over a cliff, with no place to go.  Why don't they pick out an active, 
independent  third party - preferably the Green  (How about it, Mark?) - 
and help recruit others?  Hedges, a well known progressive blogger, and 
Stahl another outspoken progressive, should look around and join a 
party, even though Ralph Nader hasn't.

The Green Party openly stands for most, if not all, of what they express.

In the spirit of peace, justice and open discussion,

Fred Duperrault

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	[ufpj-activist] Chris Hedges: ONWT March to Nowhere
Date: 	Wed, 6 Oct 2010 03:48:17 -0400
From: 	Mark Stahl <mcstahl3 at cox.net>
To: 	ufpj-activist <ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org>



Attached below is an essay by Chris Hedges about the One Nation rally on 
10/2 which he refers to as the "March to Nowhere".  Following are my 
prefatory comments to his essay.

Overall, I think that participation by the peace/antiwar movement in the 
ONWT rally was a worthy experiment, but not a truly successful one, 
although I think there was benefit provided by the Peace Table/UNAC 
contingents and by the socialist contingent, which met in the late 
morning and marched to the main event.

Other than the Belafonte speech, however, there was very little 
peace/antiwar content at the main rally, with the exception of UAW 
president Bob King, who called for an end to the Iraq and Afghanistan 
wars.  Given the major escalations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, any 
truly liberal/progressive rally should have had a major focus on ending 
the wars.  Nor was there much emphasis on Guantanamo or the steady 
erosion of civil liberties in this country.

We know why the rally did not seriously address such critical issues as 
the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the erosion of civil 
liberties, or the growing role of corporate interests:  because the 
Obama administration and the Democratic Congress have not only 
maintained the policies of the Bush administration, but in many cases 
they are actually worse than Bush, including the steady escalation of 
the drone war in Pakistan.

Yet, the major purpose of the rally was to encourage people to vote for 
Democrats on November 2.   Since the Obama administration is weak to 
catastrophic on virtually every major issue, they had no choice but to 
avoid any serious challenges to the party in power on these critical issues.

Only a movement which is independent of the major political parties, 
committed to a strong platform of immediate withdrawal from all foreign 
wars and occupations, and prepared to address issues of global 
imperialism and economic collapse, will be able to mobilize people 
effectively for the kind of radical changes necessary to move our 
society forward in the face of a growing reactionary trend in our public 
institutions.  The article by Chris Hedges follows.


Mark Stahl
Providence


  March to Nowhere


            Posted on Oct 5, 2010

By Chris Hedges

We can hold One Nation marches every week. It will not make any 
difference until we revolt against the formal structures of power.

The liberal preoccupation with positive forms of propaganda ignores the 
root of our problem. The tea party and hate mongers on Fox such as Glenn 
Beck, however repugnant, are the manifestation of the crisis, not its 
cause. The forces assaulting the remnants of American democracy will not 
be cowed or discredited with rallies, such as the one in Washington on 
Saturday. We will blunt these rising anti-democratic forces only when we 
organize outside conventional systems of power. It means dismantling the 
permanent war economy and the corporate state. It means an end to 
foreclosures and bank repossessions. It means a functional health care 
system for all Americans. It means taking care of our poor and 
unemployed. And it means a system of government that is freed from 
corporate interests.

Mass support for anti-democratic movements and public acceptance of open 
violations of human rights are not caused, in the end, by the skillful 
dissemination of misinformation or brainwashing. They are caused by the 
breakdown of a society and the death of a liberal class that once made 
reform and representative government possible. The timidity of our 
liberal class was on public display during the march in Washington. 
Speakers may have called for jobs, but none would call on citizens to 
abandon the rotting hull of the Democratic Party and our moribund 
political system or put Wall Street speculators in prison. The speakers 
at the rally proposed working within the current electoral system, 
although most Americans are aware that it has been gamed by corporate 
interests. This is hardly a call, especially given the failures of the 
Obama administration, that will fire up the unemployed and underemployed.

?We need jobs,? the Rev. Al Sharpton said at the march. ?We?ve bailed 
out the banks. We bailed out the insurance companies. Now it?s time to 
bail out the American people.?

But Sharpton and the other speakers, too close to the power elite in the 
Democratic Party, did not call for rebellion. There was no war cry 
against Wall Street and the purveyors of death in the defense and health 
industry. There was no acknowledgement that unfettered capitalism and 
globalization are killing our ecosystem and creating a worldwide system 
of neo-feudalism. There was no acceptance that the corporate state must 
be dismantled if we are to save ourselves. Any effective resistance must 
begin with a condemnation of our political elite and liberal 
institutions, including the press, the universities, labor, the arts, 
religious institutions and the Democratic Party, for selling us out. But 
the speakers on the mall in Washington would not go there. And I 
suspect, for this reason, the Americans who are hurting most found 
nothing they said of interest.

All totalitarian movements, even those that are openly criminal, succeed 
because they have widespread mass support. They are the expression of a 
yearning that sweeps through a nation that has been convulsed by 
economic dislocation, a loss of hope and flagrant political corruption. 
And in these times of lament and deprivation the absurdities, crimes and 
excesses of reactionary forces do not matter. It wasn?t hard to find out 
what Slobodan Milosevic was doing in Bosnia. It wasn?t hard in Nazi 
Germany to hear about the widespread massacres of Jews in Poland. It is 
not a secret to most Americans that Muslim detainees, held for years 
without charges, are tortured in black sites around the world. The 
murder of tens of thousands of civilians by our forces in Iraq, 
Afghanistan and Pakistan is tacitly acknowledged by the public as the 
price of war. The massive human suffering in the open-air prison that is 
Gaza is not a mystery. We know what happens to the millions of 
undocumented workers who live as stateless citizens among us and have 
become a kind of modern day slave labor force.

The rising proto-fascist movement in America is caused by a hatred and 
alienation so profound that the crimes of the state, along with the 
buffoonish antics of those who defend and champion these crimes, do not 
matter. We will not discredit the right-wing with facts, a demand for a 
respect of law or rational discussion. Propaganda or counter messages of 
tolerance are not the issue. The issue is societal collapse. This issue 
is a corporate state that has carried out a coup d?etat. The issue is 
the rupture of all mechanisms within the political process to protect 
citizens from accelerating impoverishment, internal control and 
corporate abuse. Those who refuse to acknowledge this bleak reality 
cannot offer solutions.

The right-wing propagandists have not created the problem. They have 
tapped into the moral void that has left tens of millions of Americans 
yearning for a profound and radical change. And if torture, war, racist 
attacks on immigrants, gays and Muslims, along with increased repression 
against internal dissidents, is the price for moral and economic 
renewal, many Americans are ready to sign on. If those who lead this 
rising proto-fascist movement insist on a Christian nation, teach 
creationism and believe in the physical existence of Satan, many 
Americans will sign on for this too. Hatred, when mobilized, is a very 
effective political force. And hatred, including the hatred for a 
liberal class that abandoned the working class, is what we face.

The decimation of our working class through outsourcing and 
globalization dynamited two of the most important props of the 
democratic system?class consciousness and class conflict. This has left 
traditional political parties, which once represented differing class 
interests, with nothing to offer the public beyond fringe issues such as 
abortion or gay marriage. Those in the liberal class who cling to the 
corpse of the Democratic Party do so not because they believe in the 
policies of the party?it does not differ in any significant way from the 
Republican Party?but because they hope against hope that the party will 
somehow restore itself to its former position as a defender of liberal 
values and the working class interests. It is the politics of nostalgia.

Our political theater has orphaned citizens who once looked to political 
parties to express and defend their interests. It has engendered apathy 
toward traditional social and political structures and an inchoate rage. 
This mixture of apathy and rage is a volatile cocktail. It finds its 
expression outside normal systems of dissent and in leaders who, in 
times of prosperity and stability, would be dismissed as lunatics.

No rally, no positive message, no effort to expose the idiocies of those 
arrayed against us will work until we restore to the political process 
mechanisms by which ordinary citizens can be heard. Hannah Arendt in 
?The Origins of Totalitarianism? cites the collapse of traditional 
political mechanisms, which now plagues us, as the opening needed for 
all totalitarian movements:

?The fall of protecting class walls transformed the slumbering 
majorities behind all parties into one great unorganized, structureless 
mass of furious individuals who had nothing in common except their vague 
apprehension that the hopes of party members were doomed, that, 
consequently, the most respected, articulate and representative members 
of the community were fools and that all the powers that be were not so 
much evil as they were equally stupid and fraudulent.?

The One Nation March in Washington, which lacked moral and political 
courage, did nothing to educate or rally our most important 
constituency?those out of work, those being foreclosed, those without 
hope. It refused to confront the real, corporate structures of power. It 
refused to disown Barack Obama and the Democrats. And in the end it only 
confirmed what those who hate us think of liberals.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/march_to_nowhere_20101005/


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